I was born on a Tuesday, like America’s dying. It could have been a rebirth and maybe it will be one day, but for now the dying, the dying is taking a long time.

Human bodies hit the pavement, turning into fine red mist. Human bodies burn up inside, turning into a fine white ash. In the ash: pulverized metal, concrete, glass, file cabinets, computers, pictures of the family propped up on your desk. The clicking of keyboards, conversations by the water cooler, our illusion of safety—a fine white ash. In the street, human bodies covered in human bodies. Human bodies breathing in human bodies. The fine white ash burrows into the inside flesh to wait out the years until it blooms into a cancer.

Below you the floor has turned into fire. The sick black smoke sears your lungs. You stumble towards the window. The movement of air there is strange, that window was not made to ever be opened. Shattered now, its jagged edges cut your hands. No matter how far you lean out you cannot get enough air. You look down and your heart stops. Below you the gaping wound of the broken tower belches flame, smoke, fluttering papers, people. Below you they are already falling. Below you the street receives their bodies, obliterates their bodies before the eyes of the gasping crowd. There are others up here with you but all of you are alone. Beneath the roar of the building consuming itself you hear a helicopter. It is not here for you. It is only here to watch. The miracle of your birth comes down to this final choice: burn or fly.

Ten seconds from the window to the pavement. In those ten seconds a news photographer will snap uncounted pictures of you twisting and tumbling through the air. One day your family might flip through his images looking for you. One day your family might not bear to. In the images you are so small against the enormity of what is behind you. It is Tuesday and as long as I am alive you will fall forever.

The Millionstook note, and I got advance notice of a good review forthcoming in Booklist: “Shapiro (13 rue Thérèse, 2011) has written a deeply dark yet strangely uplifting second novel, about a woman beginning to find herself, discovering her own power and the tools to make use of it.”

Meanwhile I have an excerpt of the book up at Nerve.com if you’d like to get a foretaste. I didn’t know Irina was so into red lipstick (they took their cue from the saucy book cover I’m sure), but I like. Classic and shamelessly sexy.

Lots of stuff in the hopper! I have a story out in the new Zyzzyva and a column about fairy tales coming out on HuffPo on Friday and other stuff I hope gels… The journey begins.

“In the Red has all the elements that make for a down-the-rabbit-hole story: it’s exotic, dangerous, deviant, delicious. But this is also essential reading about sex and identity–how trauma informs first loves and relationships open old wounds. Shapiro understands the balance sheet of power between men and women better than any other writer out there. In the Red deserves a place beside Colette and Anaïs Nin on every woman’s bookshelf.”

A new friend asked me over e-mail today, “What kind of novels do you write? Mystery? Romance? Sci-fi? All of the above?”

This is a question that makes me itchy all over. The last book I wrote was set in Paris, 1928, so I guess that makes it historical fiction. It’s got some lovin’ in it, so I guess it’s a romance. With erotica thrown in. But it’s also a war story with graphic battle scenes. And there’s stuff about academia and translation and memory, and fuck, I don’t know. It’s just a story, you know? The book I just turned in to my editor has a lot of stuff about being foreign so I guess it’s an immigration narrative. With crime. And myth and folklore. And a fair amount of sex. And goddamn it, I hate this question.

The answer I gave my new friend was: “‘Literary fiction’ is what I’m categorized under. Really, who knows what the fuck that means. It means it takes forever for me to shit out one book but it has, like, substance.”

That’s the best explanation I could come up with, because “literary fiction” doesn’t mean anything. It just means fiction. But it’s a marketing category that’s meant to say, “this isn’t some Harlequin Romance or some space opera, this is a story for smart people. It’s written all pretty and has philosophical aspirations, unlike genre fiction.” It’s a marketing category that pitches itself to its readers by trying to pretend it is not a marketing category. It’s also the only answer I can give without launching into a long explanation of all the shit all my books are about.

One dude, after I told him I wrote literary fiction, said, “oh, so you write real books!” I almost peed a little. Clearly, my writing real books made me worth talking to. This kind of snobbism is exhausting. This kind of snobbism is a huge, major drawback to MFA programs. The expectation was clearly that we were there to write “literary fiction.” Never mind the fact that most of us couldn’t put a narrative arc together to save our lives, learning how to write something interesting to your average plebe was beneath us. This was especially stark when the poor unfortunates who were trying to write science fiction submitted their stuff in workshops.

When I was given a sci fi piece to review, I usually wrote a little disclosure at the top that stated that I don’t really read sci fi, so some of my feedback may be off-base. I meant that since I wasn’t well-versed in sci fi, I might ask stupid questions or raise concerns that should be discarded, because I was not familiar with the conventions of the genre. One time, the teacher, a writer published in The New Yorker, the ultimate magazine for smart people, opened the workshop on a sci fi piece by saying he didn’t really read sci fi, so he didn’t know how to comment on the piece. What he clearly meant was, this material is beneath me, why are you making me read this?

After that, I stopped putting in disclosures about my unfamiliarity with certain genres into my reviews because I realized that doing so made me sound like an asshole. It doesn’t matter what marketing category a manuscript should be filed under. The only question should be, is it a good story? Is it–God forbid–fun to read?

I know! FUN?!?! Crazy. Bring up the idea that a story is supposed to be fun in an MFA program and watch the practitioners of the writing craft present turn into writhing sacks full of angry badgers. Fun is for children and the simple-minded.

The same writer who quite emphatically did not read sci fi, when confronted with a very early, very larval draft of In the Red, told me that I should take the crime part out. I should just turn the whole thing into an immigration story, because that was a proper thing to write about. Writing about guns and organized crime looked entirely too much like fun, it did not belong in a real book.

It must be I am a child. It must be I am simple-minded. I like it when stories are fun.

I am gestating what may turn out to be my next novel. Or I may just have indigestion. It’s very awkward.

Anyway, I just sent what I hope will be the final version of In the Red to my editor. Or at least close to the final version… My book contract is sitting on my desk waiting for me to decipher its legalese. Then I will sign it and wait for my sweet, tasty advance. I have been signing a shit-ton of papers lately because the husband and I just bought a condo. This barely a few months after paying off the last of our student loans–I guess we felt bereft not being owned by some bank or other. Now for the minor nightmare of American adulthood: the mortgage.

The condo comes with a bunch of pretty nice furniture because it was previously owned by a lone old lady who died in it. So, we get her stuff. I am essentially inheriting another iteration of Madame Brunet’s box in a much bigger version. I am one favored by dead old ladies I never knew, apparently. One of my new acquisitions is a player piano with scrolls! Stay tuned for a ragtime housewarming party…

You and I are driving home, reminiscing about those days when we first flirted together.

I remember the first time I looked at you with desire was in the Fall of 1998. You were driving me somewhere then too, and you said something funny. I laughed. Not to be courteous: what you’d said was truly funny, and it was a real laugh, a laugh with surprise in it. In mid-laugh I felt a pang of sadness because I was going overseas and I thought that this was your last year of graduate study, so that when I came back to Stanford, you would be gone. I thought that I would never see you again. I was mistaken.

“Do you remember?” I say. “We were in the same car we’re in now, in the same seats. The car was new then.”

Do you remember? I was leaning against the hood of this car when you first kissed me, on the evening of July 8th 1999, just a couple of weeks after I got home from Europe. It was at Ocean Beach and it was so cold and windy. We had just walked together by the water and you’d held my hand. I’d showed you the scar on my knee from the surgery on my broken leg, and you’d laid your palm on the place where my tibia is still bumpy–where it mended into an unwell shape. You were so close and I was waiting for you to kiss me. There was a bus idling at its terminus near us in the parking lot–it waited with the lights on and the doors open for its turn-around time. You were waiting for the bus to leave because you didn’t want the driver to see us. Perhaps, the driver was waiting for us too.

The three of us there, late on a thursday night.

You body touched mine and we were tired of waiting then. It was then that you put your arms around me and gave me the first kiss of many–leaning right against this car–with the bus driver watching.

In this car, you drove me to the emergency room so many times that they cannot be possibly be counted–you so quiet and worried, me curled up in the passenger seat in blinding pain as always. Some nights, not in this car. Some nights, in an ambulance.

In this car, you drove me to the hospital to get cut open.
In this car, you drove alone to San Francisco to marry me on the morning of June 6th, 2004.
In this car, you drove us home the next day from the honeymoon suite of The Seal Rock Inn–the first place we’d made love all legal-like.

This car is old now. The latch on the glove compartment just had to be replaced–its random small parts are starting to fail. One day we will have to get a new car, maybe drive some kids around.

This car: a 1998 Toyota Corolla, white.
In this car, I first looked at you with desire.
In this car eight years later, you drive me home.

We bought a new car today, a Prius in a lovely ocean color. “Sea glass pearl,” the manufacturer calls this color. In some lights it looks blue, in some lights green, in some lights gray. The ride is smooth and very, very quiet. Accelerating in this car makes a whispering wind-up sound reminiscent of stately space vessels in cheesy sci fi movies. It sounds like the future.

How did we blow past Thanksgiving already? Is the speeding of time a feature of getting older? Am I going to be on my death bed soon wondering how the hell that happened? The answer is, of course. Sometimes I’m still in a state of dull shock when I realize it’s no longer 1998. Then I look in the mirror at the little furrow between my eyebrows that used to only be there when I woke up in the mornings and my head explodes.

That furrow is a permanent resident on my face now, and will do nothing but deepen. I named that furrow George W. Bush. I have not yet decided which of my body’s signs of aging I will call Dick Cheney. I may be saving that one for something chronic, painful, and insidious, like an ulcer.

But, let’s talk about something brighter than my inexorable decay. Guess what? 13 rue Thérèse was nominated for an award! The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, to be exact. Pretty sweet, no? It’s always lovely to be surprised by a bit recognition from the outside world as I toil in my writerly cave. It gets pretty hermity in here. (I just looked up the correct adjectival form of “hermit” and it’s “heremitic,” but I much prefer “hermity.”)

Speaking of the writerly cave, I did a revision of In the Red over the past couple of months. I am going to give it another once-over, then send it along to my agent. It’s always weird to have another human being read something that’s been simmering sealed away in my head for years. It’s a real passage, and it always comes with a big dose of trepidation. I was once asked by an interviewer about what my greatest fear is when I turn in a manuscript. I said that turning in a manuscript is like trying to tell someone about an intense dream you had: it may just turn out to be incoherent hash and leave you looking like an idiot. Scary, no, when you spend a couple of years and 80000 words telling the dream?